How to track carousel banners?

We have a carousel banner on our Homepage, but we haven't started using it effectively yet. We now have a plan to exploit it, but would like to know how to go about tracking the elements (event tracking) on the carousel?

Is this something we can set up in Google Analytics or some other form of reporting, that our developer can write in to our site design?

5 answers so far...

Hi Stuart, carousels are certainly a popular feature today as the related article “to carousel or not to carousel” shows.

I suspect many aren’t tracked properly since Google Analytics cannot tell you which link is clicked to lead to the next page if there are several identical links on the home page. So it’s good to hear you’re going to use Event tracking to see which imagery and calls-to-action really work.

I made sure we specified this when we relaunched SmartInsights.

These is the way I set it up with the designers.

1. Category event label for widget = “Widget Interactions” – we report on other widgets elsewhere on site

2. The action label in Google Analytics is the Location of widget = “Home page” (since we have some widgets in multiple locations).

3. The optional third label is the click event given by the Number of tab OR on button contained on that tab. I could have used the Value label

So for a click on Tab (on right) the code to add to the on click event of the AHREF for the hyperlink is:

It’s also worth noting that many carousels don’t have tabs like ours – instead using small circles to denote the image. I’m not a fan of these since you can’t use them for navigation or call-to-action, so I specified these tabs to encourage clicks.

Another benefit of using Events for those not in the know is that this will reduce bounce rate since an event interaction is not included in bounce calculations (unless you tell Google not to include it through (non-interaction).

Stuart Sykes, Digital Marketing Manager said at 08:31 on October 19, 2012

After some research, I found out it is currently set to be standard links – but using the additional API, we can certainly very easily add in the tracking as our system generates the links as tags. Not a big or complicated job in return for some proper tracking.